A gas leak refers to a leak of natural gas or other gaseous product from a pipeline or other containment into any area where the gas should not be present. Because a small leak may gradually build up an explosive concentration of gas, leaks are very dangerous. In addition to causing fire and explosion hazards, leaks can have a harmful impact on human health, kill vegetation, including large trees, and may release powerful greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. The primary purpose of leak detection systems (LDS) is to help pipeline controllers to detect and localize leaks. LDS provide alarms and display other related data to the pipeline controllers to assist decision-making. Pipeline leak detection systems can also enhance productivity and system reliability thanks to reduced downtime and inspection time.
Currently, any given wireless sensor network for detecting gas leaks require measurements from all sensors in the network and transmit all measured sensor data to a central server, which requires high bandwidth communications and large storage capacity to store historical data. The continuous operation of sensors require adequate power to operate the sensors that can be a burden on batteries. The acquired data are analyzed on a central server using statistical methods to determine the frequency of events across a time interval and establish plume levels and locations. However, more than 70% of the information transmitted back to the central server contain little or no values as the sensors are not exposed to a gas plume causing analytics to fail. The methods known in the art cannot offer a real-time assessment of gas leaks and often require massive data collection.